GRASSROOTS/Hank Kalet

Feingold's Brave Stance

Russ Feingold is my new political hero. The Wisconsin senator has
risen above the political calculations of his party to challenge the
president, calling on the US Senate to censure President George W.
Bush for his program of warrantless wiretapping of American
citizens.

Under the program, the president ordered the National Security
Agency to begin eavesdropping on the phone conversations of Americans
without seeking a warrant for the wiretapping -- in contravention of
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The program and the theory pushed by the administration that the
president has "inherent authority to authorize whatever surveillance
he thinks is necessary" is a threat to the US Constitution, Sen.
Feingold says.

"Under this theory," he said in March during a US Senate
Judiciary Committee hearing on his call for censure, "we no longer
have a constitutional system consisting of three coequal branches of
government, we have a monarchy."

Censure is a purely symbolic tool, unlike impeachment, one that
lacks the force of law. Only one president -- Andrew Jackson in 1834
-- has been censured and he ignored it.

But censure offers the Senate an opportunity to remind President
Bush -- as the Republican Congress reminded Bill Clinton during its
impeachment proceedings -- that "no president is above the law."

Republican critics, however, are singing a different tune this
time. They are using Sen. Feingold's censure resolution as a rallying
point, accusing him of trying to score political points in
preparation for his presidential bid and calling him reckless and
irresponsible.

Whether or not Sen. Feingold has presidential ambitions is
irrelevant here. And the question of censure should not be viewed
through the prism of partisan politics (the Democrats' reluctance to
follow Sen. Feingold should suffice as proof of this).

What Sen. Feingold is doing, or at least attempting to do, is
raise real questions about the Bush administration's reliance on
secrecy, its consolidation of presidential powers under the guise of
military necessity and the half-truths and lies that led us to war in
Iraq.

The warrantless wiretaps are only the latest example of what
essentially adds up to a usurpation of power by the president. The
Boston Globe calls it "part of a growing trend by Bush toward
unilateralism in domestic as well as foreign policy," while the
columnist Tom Teepen, writing in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, accuses
the president of "claim(ing) for himself and his successors a right
to rule by fiat."

This presidential power grab -- part of the conservative "unitary
executive" theory that views the presidency as preeminent and not as
one of three coequal branches of government -- has met little
resistance in Washington. There have been some rumblings and
discontent but, when push has come to shove, Congress has been all
too willing to go along.

This is where the Feingold resolution comes in. Sen. Feingold,
Marianne Means wrote in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer last month,
"has elevated the spreading general criticism of the Iraq war and the
president's insistence on secrecy into a serious discussion of
whether Bush broke the law."

The problem, however, is that political Washington has no
interest in actually participating in the discussion. Yes, the Senate
Judiciary Committee has taken up hearings, but they are likely to go
nowhere as long as one party controls all three branches of
government. Republicans, after all, are unlikely to challenge a
Republican president -- especially the current crop of lockstep
Republicans -- while the Democrats lack the power or the backbone to
do much of anything.

"In a healthy two-party system," Gregory Stanford wrote in the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "Congress would have held, if not an
impeachment inquiry, at least sober hearings on a host of
administration misdeeds, from stifling scientific data that don't fit
its views to failing to plan for a postwar Iraq."

Sen. Feingold's resolution, therefore, while not going as far as
some Bush critics might like (i.e., impeachment), does at least raise
the possibility that offers that rare hope that someone in Washington
might actually ask a tough question.

In the end, as Jon Stewart told the senator in March on "The
Daily Show," the resolution "feels like some attempt at
accountability."

For that, he deserves our gratitude.

Hank Kalet is a newspaper editor and poet in central New
Jersey. Email grassroots@comcast.net. A version of this column
appeared in the South Brunswick Post and the Cranbury Press.